by Olivia Laing
In 1950, the year that she turned thirty-eight, a witch-hunt began in America that was in many ways more aggressive and pervasive than Senator McCarthy’s attack on communists, though it’s far less well historicised. As David K. Johnson explains in his revelatory history, The Lavender Scare, the purge began the same year as the Red Scare, and in the same way: as a rumour about State Department infiltration that sparked a national moral panic. Between seven thousand and ten thousand federal workers lost their jobs in the 1950s alone because of suspicions of homosexuality. Many struggled to find work again, and there were many suicides. One of the most formidable components of the purge was Executive Order 10450, signed by Eisenhower on 27 April 1953, three months into his presidency. It barred homosexuals (‘sex perverts’) from federal employment, along with drug addicts, alcoholics, anarchists and anyone else bent on undermining the project of America.
This document enshrined in law the belief that to be homosexual was to be innately subversive and immoral, an individualist who was by nature disloyal to the national family, not to mention a security threat because of what was regarded as a susceptibility to blackmail. A failure to conform to gender norms was seen as particularly suspicious, as an anonymous memo written by a clerk-secretary to the head of State Department security on 13 March 1953 demonstrates. It denounces eighteen co-workers as potential security threats. Reasons include women having a ‘deep voice’ or ‘very little in the way of hips’, while a male co-worker is accused of having ‘a feminine complexion, a peculiar girlish walk’. These observations were added to each suspect’s personnel file, and all were subject to further investigation.
During this period, many states either passed new laws or reinforced existing statutes to criminalize homosexual acts. Sentences ranged from fines to decades in prison simply for having sex with someone of your own gender in your own home. When Martin received a Wurlitzer grant in 1955, she ‘was terrified’, her girlfriend at the time, Kristina Wilson, recalled. ‘She thought it would ruin her career if it got out of the closet . . . In those days it was a project to keep it absolutely as undercover as you could.’ Secrecy was an armour against the prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and contempt, in which a muttered rumour about fairies or bulldaggers could scupper a whole life.
Homophobia also infiltrated the domain of medicine. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-I, an immensely powerful tool for designating which behaviours were considered normal and which cast as aberrant. Among the disorders listed was homosexuality, categorised as a ‘sociopathic personality disturbance’. In California, men convicted of consensual sodomy could be imprisoned for life in a mental hospital, subject to electric shock therapy, castration and lobotomy, ‘treatments’ that were widespread elsewhere too. In 1968, homosexuality was reclassified as a sexual deviation and in 1973, after years of activism and resistance, it was finally removed from the manual, though ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ and then ‘ego dystonic homosexuality’ lingered into the late 1980s.
What this means is that for the entire decade in which Martin lived in New York, 1957 to 1967, her sexuality was formally designated as pathological. Whether she concealed it during her involuntary institutionalisations or had the luck to encounter sympathetic psychiatrists, it was officially categorised as a sign of sickness: a symptom like catatonia or auditory hallucinations, and just as liable to shock treatment. In 1959, the young Lou Reed was given twenty-four sessions of ECT, spaced three days apart, at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, in part because of his sexuality.
During those years, Martin lived down by the waterfront in Lower Manhattan. A queer community of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, had taken up not-quite-legal residence in the abandoned nineteenth-century sailmakers’ lofts and warehouses of Coenties Slip, a haven in the most literal of terms. Martin’s first studio was on the Slip itself, followed by a beautiful, cathedral-like space on South Street. It might not have had heat or hot water, but there were vaulted ceilings and huge windows that looked straight onto the East River. She told an interviewer that they all sang when they came back from the city to this watery, cat-haunted place, adding: ‘You feel as if you’ve climbed a mountain above the confusion.’
She had relationships with at least two women during the Coenties Slip years, the sculptor Chryssa and the weaver Lenore Tawney, who occupied a neighbouring studio and whose extraordinary creations riff on some of the same plain and exultant notes as Martin’s grids. They read Gertrude Stein to each other, surely the antecedent for Martin’s curiously burbling literary style. As Martin’s biographer Nancy Princenthal rather carefully puts it, ‘the Slip, like Taos, was distinguished as a place where homosexual men and women could be comfortable, even if the constraints of the time prohibited the openness acceptable today. In fact the tension between gay and straight artists during the years Martin was in New York erupted, at times, into open hostility.’
Little wonder you might prefer to be a doorknob. But preju-dice wasn’t just enacted at the Cedar Tavern, the aggressively macho watering hole patronised by straight artists. Even after the end of the McCarthy era, it was still enshrined in law. In the 1960s cross-dressing was illegal in New York, a crime known as gender impersonation. Anyone who didn’t conform to gender stereotypes was a potential target, and the law was used to limit and frustrate queer sociability as well as sex. Drag queens, butches, effeminate men and transsexuals were regularly rounded up at the city’s gay bars, arrested and imprisoned for the crime of wearing fewer than three articles of clothing appropriate to their gender.
It was this prohibition against cross-dressing that kick-started the modern-day gay liberation movement. On 28 June 1968, police raided the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, one of the few bars in New York where dancing between same-sex couples was permitted, making it a romantic as well as erotic refuge. During these raids, cross-dressing patrons would generally be taken to the bathroom by female officers to have their gender humiliatingly verified. This time, they refused. A crowd began to gather in the street outside. When a butch lesbian fought back after being violently rammed into a patrol wagon, they erupted.
That night and the next, thousands of people were out on the streets of Greenwich Village, fighting running battles with riot police. Allen Ginsberg lived a few blocks away and for the first time in his life he ventured into the Stonewall Inn, where he was beguiled into dancing. On the way home, he commented to a friend, ‘the guys there were so beautiful – they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.’ When they parted company on Cooper Square, he yelled in salutation: ‘defend the fairies.’ A sea change was underway, but Martin wasn’t there to see it. While the drag queens lobbed bricks and garbage cans, she was out on the highways of America, escaping encounter altogether.
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To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.
The realisation that embodiment is more dangerous or oppressive for some people than others is what drives liberation movements, but it might also have formed part of the lasting appe
al of Buddhism for Martin. Zen and Taoism were enormously popular in the counterculture of the 1950s, and Martin was an ardent student, practising in her own idiosyncratic way for the rest of her life. In the 1970s, she started giving lectures and writing essays that focused not so much on her paintings as the spiritual lessons she wanted them to convey, a cross between Buddhism and the rigid Presbyterianism of her childhood. Her reputation as a desert mystic stems from these hypnotic, repetitive homilies, which return again and again to the freedom that comes when you turn your back to the world.
Buddhism teaches that the material realm is an illusion and that servicing the body’s clamorous demands leads only to suffering. As Martin put it in ‘The Untroubled Mind’, her long essay on art making and inspiration: ‘the satisfaction of appetite happens to be impossible’ (itself Freud’s argument against the absurdity of sexual pleasure as a guiding impulse). In this vision of the world, renunciation, silence, denial – themselves the watchwords of the closet – are not ways of avoiding life but of entering the liberating dimension of the spiritual, where, in the lovely words of the Heart Sutra, ‘form is only emptiness, emptiness only form.’ Freedom is a consequence of relinquishing the material world. It’s the same magical dematerialisation her paintings enact – painful categories abolished, dangerous bodies left behind.
In August 2015 there was an exhibition of Martin’s work at Tate Modern, the old power station transformed, just as Terry Castle had suggested, into a vast orgone box. When I went it was raining. My friend was late and I waited in the vestibule by the white birches, looking out over the river as a tide of damp people filtered gratefully through the doors, many of them dressed in transparent macs. No one stood out. Everyone had been anonymised by the weather.
Walking into the gallery was like stepping off a ledge into deep water. The paintings hummed. They were like windows into how the world would be if all the architecture was removed, the language gone, the concepts dispensed with, the forms melted away. What if you stopped wanting, I wrote in my notebook, what if you gave in and let the moment seize you. A few days earlier I’d had sex with an old lover, unexpectedly, and my body was still ringing with pleasure and confusion.
I stood for a long time in front of a painting called White Stone. From across the room it looked wet and gleaming, rain over an ocean, endlessly receding. I’d met the man back in the 1990s, when we were practising Buddhism, with a similar combination of scepticism and intensity. The relationship between us had been dangerous and ecstatic. Looking back at it now, we were in search of some kind of abandon, only each time we went out over the ledge we got caught in a vicious undertow, strange objects smashing into us in the dark. Aversion, ignorance and craving, the three poisons that lead to suffering. We used to go on camping retreats and at night there’d be pujas in the shrine tent and in the wavering candlelight people would rise one by one and throw themselves down in front of the altar. It was called full prostration practice, and people did it maybe twenty or a hundred times. People meaning me. The ecstasy of self-effacement, surrendering the ego, letting everything go. You weren’t bowing to a God, you were just bowing.
The sex we had was like that too, like you could fall out of the world altogether. He was a physicist and sometimes he’d tell me about the atomic level of reality, where nothing was as solid as it looked, not trees or buildings or our two bodies, one of them at least an animal that didn’t want the gender it had been given. Animal meaning me. There were no hard edges, not really, just particles falling through empty space. It was like the Heart Sutra said: ‘No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch, or what the mind takes hold of.’ Or as Virginia Woolf put it in The Waves: ‘Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.’ Imagine the relief.
The painting was a grid on a gessoed white surface. You had to stand pretty close for its glow to resolve into two closely placed sets of pencil lines, one graphite-grey and the other rose-red. The whole thing shimmered, tender and diffuse, the hand-made quality counteracting any potential rigidity or coldness. It was good to look at. Reviewing a Martin retrospective in the New Yorker in 2004, Peter Schjeldahl speculated that her paintings produced what he described as a ‘conceptual traffic jam’, adding: ‘My analytical faculties, after trying to conclude that what I’m looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses into a momentary engulfing state that is either “spiritual” or nameless.’
I was certainly feeling something. The paintings unlatched a whole suite of emotions, among them pleasure, sadness, longing, even gratitude. I didn’t think it was the product of a perceptual trick, though. It was something to do with the architecture of the grid itself. The point about a grid is that all the disparate tensions are in balance. There are four sets of opposing forces, and they’re all ratcheted equally. We feel this instinctively, since a line that isn’t tensioned will simply sag. The paintings were so large, and so evidently the product of long, meticulous, repetitive labour, that they begged the question of what forces were being mastered, what kind of longings assuaged.
Martin herself often said that her paintings were about innocence, by which she meant a kind of pristine openness that she associated with childhood. ‘My paintings are about merging, about formlessness’, she told her friend the artist Ann Wilson. ‘A world without objects, without interruption.’ I thought about that statement as I stood there, and for a long time afterwards. Most of us experience merging as a product of love or sex, which has the power to flood or obliterate the ego’s defences – the dizzy, oceanic high of falling in love or fucking, until the boundary between self and other turns foamy and dissolute. What would you merge with in a world without objects? Nothing?
In a way, yes. The kind of merging Martin was advocating was not to do with other people. It was the product of stringent self-denial, designed to facilitate access into a far richer spiritual reality. ‘Solitude and independence for a free mind’, she wrote in 1972. She’d always been an advocate of self-reliance, maintaining tight control over her needs and resources long after she became very rich indeed. She never allowed herself to depend on anyone else for fulfilment or care, and quickly banishing them if she did let down her guard. In New Mexico, her renouncement of worldly things seems to have included romantic and sexual relationships. ‘Fifteen minutes of physical abrasion’, she once said to an interviewer, though she may have been laughing at the time.
Withholding pleasure from herself was a route to freedom from the ego, a monkish practice of self-denial. But if the years of living off coffee and bananas were a kind of spiritual austerity measure that brought manifest rewards, they were also a safeguard against the omnipresent danger of being flooded by the outside world. People, animals, music, even food had the capacity to capsize her. ‘I can’t deal with distraction,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a dog because they demand love.’
In the 1940s and 1950s, while Reich was building his orgone accumulators and cloudbusters, a group of his former colleagues formulated a set of ideas that casts a rather different light on Martin’s world without objects. Before the war, Reich had worked closely with two of the people who would go on to develop object relations theory, practising with Melanie Klein at the Ambulatorium in Vienna and with Edith Jacobson at the Berlin Poliklinik. He and Klein had never been close, but Jacobson was a friend and political ally as well as colleague.
In psychoanalytic terms, object relations refers to an individual’s capacity to form connections with other beings, the so-called object world. As Jacobson explains in her 1954 essay ‘The Self and the Object World’, in very early infancy there is no differentiation between self and other. The infant experiences itself as part of the mother. Through repeated experiences of minor frustration, of being hungry or wet or wanting comfort, it comes to realise that the mother is a separate, independent being. This process of differentiation – of realising that the world is composed of many people, each with their own needs – begins the hard road t
o maturity.
But the longing to re-establish total union never quite goes away. We all share a desire to recover the lost paradise of uterine existence, when we were warmly housed inside the body of another, when there was no differentiation between the loved object and the self, no separation and therefore no possibility of need or loss. In the late 1990s, when she was in her eighties, Martin began a series of paintings that celebrate this primitive, devoted state. Little Children Loving Love. An Infant’s Response to Love. A Little Girl’s Response to Love. I Love Love, Loving Love, Lovely Life. They were nearly all formed of horizontal stripes in what Terry Castle once tartly called Sippee Cup colours, the watery pinks, yellows and blues with which the infant realm is furnished.
To leave this paradise for the object world, the world of other people, other bodies, other needs and desires, means experiencing inevitable rejection and lack, but there are abundant compensations. When Sylvester sings ‘you make me feel mighty real’ (and you might want to take a minute to call him up from the world of the dead that is YouTube to listen to the message again), he is taking an objects relation position. As Klein, Jacobson and their British colleague Donald Winnicott all taught, one of the major rewards of the separation process is the feeling of reality conveyed by being apprehended by another, starting with the smiling face of the mother, the first good object.
That’s assuming, of course, that the mother is a good object. Though Martin was reticent about many elements of her life, she was garrulous in telling the story of her own mother, Margaret, who didn’t love her and who she believed wanted to destroy her. She remembered being kept locked out of the house all day, playing alone in the dirt, telling an interviewer for the New Yorker :
My mother didn’t like children, and she hated me, god how she hated me. She couldn’t bear to look at me or speak to me – she never spoke to me . . . When I was two, I was locked up in the back porch, and when I was three, I would play in the backyard. When I came to the door, my sister would say, ‘you can’t come in.’